Robert Louis Stevenson 
New Arabian Nights 

Stevenson’s title for these tales of imagination clearly shows what he intended their character to be. Plainly they were not meant to be realistic. Their stilted, artificial style is out of keeping with such an object. They were evidently to be stories which are entertaining in the same way that the ‘Arabian Nights’ is entertaining, with just as little pretence of realism. As a child in his grandfather’s manse at Colinton he had devoured the eastern tales; the New Arabian Nights, written when he was twenty-eight, are a special form of literary invention which came easily from Stevenson’s habit of investing the most ordinary places and people with the wildest romance. The stories are peculiar in that their artificial style leaves one ungripped by the horror of adventure, such as those of The Suicide Club. But the artificiality was clearly deliberate; when he wanted, no one better than Stevenson could write tales of horror to make the flesh creep. He did in fact project a series of this kind, of which only one or two were completed. But in the New Arabian Nights it is easy to see his precise aim at a lighter effect. No doubt the pleasure in the technical problem — at once Stevenson’s curse, and the source of his unequalled prose — prompted this experiment.